Tom Cruise soars as real-life drug-smuggling, gun-running aviator
American Made
Starring Tom Cruise, Domhnall Gleeson & Sarah Wright
Directed by Doug Liman
R
The sky… that smile… those sunglasses—Tom Cruise is flying again!
Three decades after playing swaggering Navy ace “Maverick” Mitchell in Top Gun, the actor once chosen as People magazine’s Sexiest Man Alive (1995) is back, climbing into the danger zone in this comedy-drama based on the real life of a former TWA pilot who became involved with a South American drug cartel in the 1980s.
Cruise’s character, Barry Seal, works as covert operative for the CIA, runs guns to fighters in Nicaragua, smuggles cocaine for the Mendellín Cartel, trains Contras in Arkansas and eventually ferries home so many bags, satchels and suitcases bulging with cash that he literally runs out of places to hide them.
Seal was a bit player in a much bigger governmental shell game of collusion, intervention and South American involvement, spanning eight years and two administrations, that eventually culminated in the Iran-Contra Scandal.
“Is all this legal?” he asks his cryptic CIA contact, who goes the name of Schafer (Domhnall Gleeson).
Domhnall Gleeson
“If you’re doing it for the good guys,” Schafer tells him with a shrug. “Just don’t get caught.”
It’s a wild and crazy tale, and Cruise is perfect for the role of Seal—brash, carefree, cocky, confident, “the youngest pilot in TWA history” when he’s plucked from the cramped cockpit of his commercial airliner and offered the opportunity to do something exciting, secretive, dangerous and potentially lucrative “for your country.”
Seal’s real-life saga isn’t necessary a funny one—he did, after all, create and maintain a major pipeline for cocaine into the United States and played a role in international political meddling that cost many lives. But American Made finds the dark humor in the absolute absurdity of his unique situation, as an individual who happened to be in the right place at the right time—and who embraced it for all it was worth.
As played by Cruise, Seal is like an impossibly handsome, incredibly lucky Forrest Gump, moving from scenario to scenario, intersecting with characters who’ll later show up in the news (Panamanin dictator Manual Noriega, U.S. Marine Lt. Col. Oliver North, Columbian drug lord Pablo Escobar). He juggles home life with his wife (Sarah Wright) and two young daughters with his increasingly frenzied governmental skullduggery and his own lucrative sideline smuggling operations.
And he gets filthy rich doing it—until his luck eventually runs out.
“Hot damn!” he says. “If this ain’t the greatest country in the world!”
Director Doug Liman, whose previous films include The Edge of Tomorrow—also starring Cruise—and The Bourne Identity, keeps things crisp, concise and crackling. He uses a mixture of techniques, including cartoon animation and narration by Seal (Cruise), to tie the sprawling pieces of the story together. And he pays attention to details that remind you this tale came from the 1970s and ’80s. Seals does business with high stacks of quarters from banks of pay phones. When a character purchases a new used car, it’s a dinky Gremlin X. Soundtrack tunes (The Allman Brothers’ One Way Out, Walter Murphy’s A Fifth of Beethoven, Linda Ronstadt’s Blue Bayou, George Harrison’s Wah Wah) help set the retro mood, and the movie’s color pallet recalls the super-saturated yellows, greens and blues of Kodachrome.
Jesse Plemons plays a small-town sheriff who gets a whiff of Seals and his operation, but his part seems either underwritten, or greatly reduced in editing—to squeeze into the movie’s crammed second half, when several new characters are introduced. As Seals’ wife, Wright is given little to do, which matches the skimpy wardrobe (negligee and cut-off shorty-short jeans) she’s given to wear. If the film’s trying to make any kind of statement—about governmental collusion and corruption, amoral scoundrels on both sides of the border, greed or whatever—it doesn’t really leave that impression.
But Cruise sure does—a movie star soaring high and back in his element in this feverishly upbeat film frolic about a footnote figure in a shady chapter of American history.
In theaters Sept. 29, 2017
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